Group items tagged

"At www.mta.me, Conductor turns the New York subway system into an interactive string instrument. Using the MTA's actual subway schedule, the piece begins in realtime by spawning trains which departed in the last minute, then continues accelerating through a 24 hour loop. The visuals are based on Massimo Vignelli's 1972 diagram."

This a travel guide to our Sound World - listing places where what you hear is an important part of the experience. I'm very interested in suggestions for possible places with interesting sounds and other acoustic phenomena. Find places either via the soundmap, this list of all sites, via a search or click on the Tag Cloud."

"Manual for Acoustic Planning and Urban Sound Design (MAP) is a public artwork based on working for one year within the city council in the experimental role of Dublin City Acoustic Planner & Urban Sound Designer, negotiating the projects' agenda and workflow in response to how this concept is received internally within the council. This project emphasizes a dematerialized practice through which practical outputs (in the form of public sound installations) emerge as residual artifacts that are encountered as design prototypes executed within (or even by) the council itself. This approach opens new channels for the city - as an institution - to engender a sense of responsibility and possibility regarding this mode of working with sound in the urban context as an extension of existing planning and design processes."

"Sound maps of rivers and songs for cicadas are two examples of a new kind of music inspired by 19th-century German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz. Inventing his own resonator, the scientist broke down the frequencies of tonal sounds, indirectly showing music as the gathering of disparate elements in space. Foot Notes: On the Sensations of Tone, currently on view at apexart, takes Helmholtz as its patron saint of ecologically minded sound art, with nine practitioners presenting their own experiments with unconventional music."

"In this project I continue to use creative methods for understanding and interpreting how listening to everyday sounds and soundscapes function as sources or triggers for the imagination*. This involves investigating the roles sound and listening play in visualisation through associative, emotional and memory responses as cognitive functions. In particular, my interest is in understanding how the qualities of these functions change as we age and what can be done to exercise our imagination. In the context of Sounds of our Cities we could sum this up in a few basic questions… one, what happens to our active childhood imaginations as we get older? Two, how do the sounds of Krottegem in Roeselare contribute to how people imagine their neighbourhood? And three, can this method be used for citizens and planners in imagining new ways to understand their city space?"

"Ultra-red pursue a fragile but dynamic exchange between art and political organising. Through the performance of a militant sound investigation, the audio collective map contested spaces and histories as an articulation of social relations. Drawing on the formal strategies of early Conceptualism, We Come from Your Future facilitates a particular kind of discursive action whose performance of announcing and denouncing constitute an intervention. We Come from Your Future is comprised of two episodes in which Ultra-red ask, "What are the sounds of anti-racism?" Posing this question in the context of anti-racist and migrant organizing in the UK, the first episode features a set of dispatches that combine audio compositions with accompanying field reports. These online dispatches lead up to and inform an on-site event as part of the Triennial Prologues: Altermodern at Tate Britain on June 28. "

"Variable 4 is an 8-speaker outdoor sound installation which translates weather conditions into musical patterns in real time. Using meteorological sensors connected to a custom software environment, the weather itself acts as conductor, navigating through a map of 24 specifically-written movements."

"As I started exploring, I began noticing the sounds around me. I began to think that maybe instead of focusing my attention only on the "Kodak moments" - and don't get me wrong, I take a lot of photos - perhaps using the SoundCloud mobile app to isolate and feature my "sonic experiences" would be another really cool way to map and document my Toronto travels. And thus, the Sounds of My City project was born!"

The London Sound Survey collects the sounds of everyday public life throughout London and compiles past accounts to show how the sound environment has changed.

This site documents my work as a mixed-media artist. I've worked primarily with sound and video since the early 1990s and performed and worked on projects throughout Europe and North America. In recent years I have also concentrated on giving workshops on various aspects of sound that encourage collaboration through social communication, performance, mapping, recording and editing. - ohn grzinich

"A tree's year rings are analysed for their strength, thickness and rate of growth. This data serves as basis for a generative process that outputs piano music. It is mapped to a scale which is again defined by the overall appearance of the wood (ranging from dark to light and from strong texture to light texture). The foundation for the music is certainly found in the defined ruleset of programming and hardware setup, but the data acquired from every tree interprets this ruleset very differently."

" "Devine has taken data from NASA's Kepler missions to create individual compositions that occupy each floor of the 29 metre high tower, built in 1758. Each composition can be thought of as a subset of this set of data, and a mapping of the range of frequencies and information gathered by the missions to a more manageable human scale. The compositions from each star's data are positioned according to their age, frequency range and the number of exoplanets they host, moving upwards through the tower, which could almost have been custom built for the installation. [...] As you ascend through the building, you're also moving light years through the universe, outwards towards the different solar systems with their exoplanets and changing resonances. Just as musical instruments resonate with frequencies, so can the stars and planets, and it is this resonance that Devine has scaled for the human ear.""

This CD consists of geothermal recordings of vibrations in the ground around the area of Krisuvik, Geysir and Myvatn in Iceland. The recordings have been carried out using accelerometers inserted into the earth at various places around the geysers, mapping the sonic aspects of volcanic activity at the surface of the earth."

"Sacred Spaces examines the crucial role sound has played in our spiritual and religious lives for thousands of years, and explores the sonic similarities between different religions, and different types of sacred space from across the world."

What is phonography? In this essay, Christopher DeLaurenti, a phonographer with three decades of experience, maps an axiomatic 13-lesson pedagogy through an abbreviated history of field recording, from Jesse Walter Fewkes in 1890 to Tony Schwartz in the early 1960s. This paper surveys various meanings and uses of the term phonography from a text published in 1701 to the formation in 2000 of the phonography listserv, an online community of makers of field recordings.

"Pushing off from experiences in which music hails its listener in terms of communal belonging, this essay tries to productively shift our attention towards the queerness of sound itself, as both an agent and a solvent of the political experience of antagonism encountered when identification claims us (or fails to claim to us). Sound- not music but the raw immanence of sounds we cannot identify- can let us hear what is not yet locatable on the available maps of identity. Hearing the queerness of sound might help us echo-locate the edges of subjection, and encounter its ontological outside."

"The Manhattan Rhythm Machine is an interactive generative beat maker. Loops for each instrument are represented with cut up segments of a circle. These are moved through a two dimensional space of rhythms with axes of edginess and density which are mapped to rhythms through a beat hierarchy derived from how off-beat each position in the bar is."

"Research blog following the development of Sound Art through compositional and performative techniques in music, fine art, experimental film and creative computing. Each post is continually under development, and serves as a mapping of the author's listening habits and interests, please feel free to comment underneath with any thoughts or additions. If you own the copyright on any of the music/pictures/videos posted and do not want them to exist here, email the below address and they will be removed forthwith. "

"Artificial synesthesia (syn = together, and aisthesis = perception in Greek) is a deliberately evoked or induced sensory joining in which the real information of one sense is accompanied by a perception in another sense through the use of a cross-modal mapping device. It is also known as virtual synesthesia or synthetic synesthesia. The additional perception is regarded by the trained synesthete as real, often outside the body, instead of imagined in the mind's eye. Its reality and vividness are what makes artificial synesthesia so interesting in its violation of conventional perception. Synesthesia in general is also fascinating because logically it should have been a product of the human brain, where the evolutionary trend has been for increasing coordination, mutual consistency and perceptual robustness in the processing of different sensory inputs."